CEO

In theory this is very wrong. Pampering CEO, MD or any such party over, or at the expense of guests is the ‘wrongest’ one can get in resort/hotel business. Nevertheless, theories are like laws which are made to break, sometimes to follow. Lets examine why a resort worker may need to break this theory in the first place.

The situation: The ideal situation where a customer is NOT the most important in the business premises (imagine, Gandhi is said to have uttered such nonsense!) is when the CEO or the MD visits a resort for his or her R&R at one of his or her resorts. Of course the resort will be duly notified in advance so the resort can allocate the favourite room for the boss, arrange the insides of the room according to the known preferences of the VIP etc. Things start moving from there. Every piece of furniture or equipment in the selected room is checked, re-checked, vetted and inspected many times over to the satisfaction of a number of managers and supervisors until as much as humanly possible is done to whatever it was.

However running and maintaining a 5 star resort in the middle of Indian ocean in sprint condition is an arduous task those who know about it know. Major items on supply lists might disappear without a reason through the ordering process. Bulky, expensive hardware items imported from abroad may found out to be defective upon arrival, sometimes with little recourse to compensation. For reasons like these, sometimes it may just be difficult to keep a guest room in top-notch position, but who in his sane mind would want to share this knowledge with the CEO? A basic and much overused requirement in hotel industry is the ‘can-do thing’. You have to have that approach even if its impossible or even if it requires deception. So even if something is impossible there is no telling of that fact to the boss. Everything is can-do, if not it will be seen as a lacking on the person who admitted it. These lines bring us closer to the theory above. For example:

Q: A ceiling fan in the room where the CEO is arriving is dead but there are good fans in other guest rooms. Now what to do?
A: Remove it from the nearest guest room and fix it at the CEO’s room. Explain to guests (with a broad sheepish smile!) that the fan is broken and a new one is being ordered.

Guests in general are not very fussy, they are good natured and unlikely to notice things like this. However a CEO will and once a blemish in his service or accommodation is found out, the time to explain it would have expired. So being a lowly worker or a middle manager, we are all here to make a living. We can only serve guests by being employed. So to be in the employ of a resort sometimes the guest has to be inconvenienced to appease the CEO.